Popular US crypto exchange Coinbase has just enabled full support for trading Ripple’s XRP. The token is now available on the exchange’s professional trading platform, Coinbase Pro (formerly GDAX), while the company’s Android and iOS apps to follow later.
In a blog post, officials revealed the launch would take place in four vital stages including transfer-only, post-only, limit-only, and the final stage, full-trading mode. Coinbase will post tweets announcing the stages separately.
Coinbase will open trading of XRP around 12 hours after the announcement was made. The exchange points out that the new coin will be accessible for users in most jurisdictions, but will not initially be available for residents of the state of New York.
As usual, when the listing of a new coin on a major exchange is announced, there was a significant increase in the trading volume of XRP and a big price spike.
At the time of writing, XRP was enjoying a 24-hour surge of 10 percent, a completely different change in scenario from yesterday when the cryptocurrency was almost unchanged. The coin was trading at $0.335 with a total market cap of $13.9 billion and a 24-hour market volume of $972 million.
XRP has a different purpose
The addition of Ripple’s coin comes as cryptocurrency exchanges are beginning to copy the safeguards commonly used by their mainstream counterparts after a steady stream of hacks, asset thefts, and technical issues. The XRP protocol is seen as the most sophisticated in this context as it is already adopted or tested by several big banks.
Although Ripple is regularly grouped in with other cryptocurrencies, its purpose is different as it also operates a decentralized payment settlement solution for banks and financial institutions that is fast and scalable. Because its xRapid solution has a much shorter transaction time, there have been major companies testing the product such as Western Union and Moneygram, but none have committed to it fully.
Coinbase has had a string of recent announcements in a major push to attract crypto traders and grow its user base. While other exchanges offer a wider selection of cryptocurrencies to trade, Coinbase has elected to proceed cautiously while regulators evaluate the legal status of the new currencies.
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